The existing setup works very well with Standard. Since the BIOS detects the device when the notebook starts up, all I did was write LILO to the USB device and then set the boot order on the notebook. If the USB device is plugged in, it becomes the first boot device. If it's not plugged in, the hard drive on the notebook is the first boot device.

A working installer for this type of setup will be much appreciated. Danke!

OK.. I just tried this because I had some time to try to debug this,

I have an external USB drive that I use most of the time to boot ISO's and as backup drive for all kinds of things. Downloaded an old beta1 ISO and booted it up, the installer even the old code shows my external drive as available target partitions.

Tried a newer ISO, and it does too.My internal drive is /dev/sda and external is /dev/sdb.

I dont know what is different about your device. Can you give us information about it... ? interface, make, model, current partition table print out

Can someone else with another device try this?

I am an idiot... Please stop whatever you're doing with the installer.

I'll explain shortly, after I fix the MBR of my Windows installation and fix LILO for the external drive.

OK.. SOHO is installed. I was misreading the GUI installer which is something that may crop up with newer users.

With the text installer, even though it will identify the CD-ROM drive and specifically state "I found the installation CD", the GUI Installer doesn't really do this. It says the drive that will install is /dev/hda which kind of threw me for a loop. I mistook that for /dev/sda thinking it was finding only the hard drive. Yeah yeah yeah.. Rookie mistake. But I can see where someone who isn't familiar with sda/hda/sdb, etc. could get VERY confused.

I need to boot the installer again to verify, but when I got to the boot loader portion, I immediately selected boot sector on the second drive. THEN I selected LILO which defaulted the boot choice back to MBR. I didn't catch it and borked the MBR on /dev/sda. Not a huge thing, just slap the Win 7 CD in there and get to the repair tools, but it was a bit of a pain.

Once I got the rookie mistakes taken care of, I got the Kernel Panic error again. Easily solved by adding rootdelay=10 in LILO.

First impression on boot up? NICE!

However, it's not seeing my wireless network for some reason. Need to go in and play with it a bit to see why it's not seeing things properly. First time I booted into SOHO, it worked but I couldn't access the Internet. Bugged out to root, shut down the firewall service then bugged back over to the user account. Now it doesn't see the wireless network. Hmmmmm. I'll figure it out and report back. Suspect it's something very minor.

Biggest concern with the installation at this point is the GUI Installer. If someone who didn't know much, if anything about Linux tried to use it, I think they'd be in a world of hurt. Moi? I prefer the text installer. I'm used to it, and it's fast. But we should remember that users who haven't a clue will be using the GUI and things should be as explicit as possible. While we may not be able to make it idiot proof, we should be able to get it close.

Perhaps not changing the label per se, but rather provide a more detailed description for the appropriate screen?

For example, when the installer checks to see where the installation files are located, there could be something on the screen along the lines of "Select the location of source installation files or CD." The way it's worded now lead me to believe that the device was the target for the installation, not the source.

C'est bon... just installed beta4.2, GUI installer worked again on an old sharp mebuis laptop embeded with Savage 3 graphic chips(S3), but installer didn't offer option to install LILO/grub on floppy disk.....

RTL8187 usb wifi card still doesn't work properly, the internet will drop and get lost in 5-10 minuts,editting "/etc/modprobe.conf"and adding --------------------alias rtl8187 wlan0options mac80211 ieee80211_default_rc_algo=pid--------------------made not much improvement so far, any other fixinging command /or kernal patch we could try to test?

a bien tot!

I'm seeing similar behavior with my wireless card as well. Boots fine and works for a while, then all connectivity is lost.

New ISOs were uploaded a couple of days ago that should have fixed the issue.

I compared the original 4.2 md5 with the supposedly updated 4.2 md5 and they were identical. I would have expected a difference if _anything_ had changed, including the iso structure. I think granny already asked, but, is there a way we can confirm the iso available are actually the updated versions?

Alrighty new iso is up. Please give it another hour or so to migrate to osuosl.org's outside servers (it is 11:00pm pst here) Please try again those with boot problems with the original ..................thank you very much!!!

12th post 25

Quote from: Granny Geek

Alas, the most recent ISO for beta 4.2 didn't boot here, either. At the "boot from CD" line while the computer is starting up, it tries to boot the CD and reports Failure.I downloaded it about 3 a.m. Eastern Time and the checksum matched what Vector posted. Can I be sure I got the new version?

16th post 38

Quote from: CAI ENG

Any news with regard to change to the installer....?

16th post 39

Quote from: retired1af

New ISOs were uploaded a couple of days ago that should have fixed the issue.

So, are these "New ISOs" the same ones that Vec reported having uploaded on the 11th, (which, Granny Geek discovered, would not boot,) or, are you referring to some undocumented newer version, e.g. Beta 4.2.2 ?

FIgured out the wireless drop issue. Whenever the system goes to sleep, it also drops the Internet connection. When you wake the system, the wireless is not being reconnected, and in a recent occurance, was unable to obtain an IP address once I told it to set up wireless again via VASMCC.

Also noticed the root password is not being saved when "remember password" is selected whenever the wireless attempts to connect.